Xfx 8800 Ultra Xxx Problem

cognoscentiFTW

Ahhh I see well thanks for enlightening me.

I guess I was just lucky these have held out, touchwood.

As long as they last until November for the release of new cards.

cognoscentiFTW

SlickRic21, there is obviously a problem and you may well be correct that the cards dont like running so close to the boundaries.
I hope you manage to get it resolved though one way or the other.


Hi sweetheart,

Sorry to dissapoint by not being an XFX employee and also apologise for not having more posts (gotta start somewhere) but the only reason I signed up was to add my comments on the cards and that I have no major problems like the ones here.


Apology accepted in advance.

Heres some goodness just for you...




STOCK AIR COOLING.... The actual core speed it is running is [COLOR=red]not[/COLOR] 695 but 702 as shown below (but you would know about the scales already Im sure)

slickric21

cognoscentiFTW I see over on XFX support forum and on OCN you are a keen OC'er and you've posted all your benchmark scores and are quite rightly proud of your "babies" in all their number totting glory and your OC'ing prowess.

Have you used your cards for any periods of prolonged gaming ?
If so which games have you played ?, just interested because myself and several others have no problems with the card running benchmarking tools - but in certain games they sometimes freeze.

As per several posts up, DiRT is one game which my card hates - fast paced,HDR,mulitsampling, complex shadows etc etc. BF2 occasionally freezes and R6:vegas has once or twice.

P.s when you get your new cards in november can I have your old ones ?

cognoscentiFTW

Hey there Ric,

Im not what you would call a big gamer, mainly due to not enough time and also being pretty useless at it. lol

BF2 runs fine and also Dirt (1920x1200) with all settings on max.

slickric21

Yup looking good,
Games also look alright aswell .

Well you seem to have a couple of good 'uns there then, I wonder if there is a revised bios or something as you got your cards quite recently.
One avenue I could explore if I have no joy with my RMA to Scan.co.uk - which I can chase up 2mrw.

Cheers for the heads up and letting us know at least some of these cards can run sweet.

Flash Freeze

That is not true, actually XFX is running Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ08 memory chips "underspec !! " They are rated for 1250MHz, with double data rate (DDR) translates to 2500MHz. So running at 2300MHz is underspec. Apparently in order to reduce the power consumption they reduced the voltage given to the mem chips, form its rated 1.9v to 1.8v. That's why you cannot hit 2500MHz without having to use extreme cooling/volt modding.

Link

Link


Exactly. I had my XXX version running on a desk with room temps of 18-20C and it locked up.



I can confirm that when you lower the clocks you can get rid of the hard-locks. And I dont blame you for thinking they are running the mem clocks overspec since lowering it seems to eliminate the problem. But as I stated above the mem chips are very well built to work at those speeds.

Then what is left to blame? I think its either the QC Quality Control that is weak at XFX or the fact that they lowered the voltage given to these chips for whatever reason they had in mind(target clock/power consumption) only leaves the lucky cards out there working properly at 2300MHz. I am very much suspecting the latter. They (XFX) might be able to fix it with a simple new bios that raises the Vmem a bit higher.

Although I still think XFX needs to revamp its QC policies entirely and thank you for getting in contact with nVIDIA about this. I still dont understand how can AIB partners (all of them either on nv side or ati side not only xfx) ship defective or DOA cards out there. What is the QC department doing there then? IMO there shoudnt be even ONE defective card on the market. The QC should give every card a thorough work-out before shipping but I guess that would be asking for too much. (in AIB parners' eyes that is)

I am also a benchmark monkey myself (sometimes ) so I know a benhmark safe overclock when I see one. You know the kind of overclock that you cannot run demanding games on high AA/AF high res for many hours. No desktop backround and the simple gray windows theme with all the services turned off. Hmm yea that has got to be some benching session clocks not 24/7 gaming clocks.

Oh ! btw for anyone that might be looking at those pics NEVER put your mobo CPU, RAM or Graphics Cards on the carpet like shown in that picture. That is not healthy !!! the ESD is going to kill or damage them eventually.

As for me I am on a 650 version now and it is working ok it can also hit XXX clocks.

slickric21

Well I got my card back from a 2nd RMA and for the second time the supplier found no fault.

I can live with it though as I know I can get it running no problems by setting fan speed to 85% in rivatuner for certain games. I may even use this guide and set up the fan speeds if i get the time
http://home.comcast.net/~boogieman19...ed%20guide.htm

Anyway Looking forward to 9800 release later in the year.

Dalton Sleeper

Isn't there an application that you can dump/edit you bios and then flash the card with nvflash? Don't know the name or if you can change vmem though.

If XFX released a new bios with higher vmem for the XXX (if it's even possible) would I be able to use it on My XFX 8800 Ultra (612/1500/1080)? I can only reach a stable core clock of 648 (655 in other apps) but my shader lies at 1600+, I was thinking it might be the shader that is limiting the overclock because if I raise the core clock the shader bumps up over 1700 witch seems quite much.

Is there a difference in vgpu and vmem at the 612 and XXX version?

Flash Freeze

Yes NiBiTor would do that. But I dont see any option to change the Vmem through NiBiTor bios editor though, at least not for Geforce 8 series.


I was just speculating on the Vmem needing a bit more juice and that XFX might release a new bios, but you can at least check the Vcore on your card and see if it is lower than the overclocked versions or not by getting the latest NiBiTor from here and reading your card's bios into NiBitor.


For comaprison my 8800 Ultra Extreme Version (650) has a Vcore of 1.35 for 3D wich is higher than 1.3 of the vanilla 8800 GTX.


If your card is a 8800 Ultra and its Vcore turns out to be lower than 1.35v you can try and make a modified bios yourself by taking a 8800 Ultra bios with 1.35 Vcore and lowering/setting its GPU/Shader/Memory clock speeds to that of a normal/stock 8800 Ultra, then after flashing your card with your modified bios you can manually overclock and check if the lower Vcore was holding your GPU back from reaching higher clocks or if it was just as high as your chip could go.


I had done the same thing with my vanilla XFX 7900GTX before. Back then there was an overclocked PNY 7900GTX card wich had a slight 0.05 Vcore bump. I used that bios and edited it to have stock 7900GTX clocks. It turned out my card could OC pretty well with the new bios so I flashed it again with the highest stable clocks I could get using the new Vcore.


Well one of my 7900GTXs could get that high. The other one couldnt OC even a bit higher than stock clocks with the stock or modded bios.

I dont think I have to mention that messing with VGA bios is a tricky business and you might end up killing your card if you mistakenly enter wrong values when editing the bios or if something happens to go wrong during the bios flash.

Dalton Sleeper

Thanks, tried NiBitor but the vcore was already at 1.35

I guess there isn't any program that overclock only the core and not the shader, a few GTS cards have a locked shader clock but I guess it's in the bios.

I don't want to flash right now because there's a whisteling sound from my gfx and might have to send it back, but want to wait a while until nVidia releases the 9800 and then I might be able to switch to that one instead of a new 8800.

Anyway, wonder how XFX going to solve the problems with the XXX... A new bios would be great, it's not that fun to get the card replaced several times to get one that really works.

Just Learnin'

My first card whistled under load and also artifacted. Others who have had the whistling noise have also had their cards replaced. The new card does not whistle and there are no artifacts. It also overclocks very well. It took them some time to send the replacement and they assured me they had rigorously tested it and that I should have no problems. Since the turn-around time was so long they also sent me a PC toolkit and a free copy of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. Also I only sent them the card alone with no accessories and they sent me the full retail box as a replacement with all the cables as well as another copy of GRAW.

Flash Freeze

If your core clock reaches 689MHz or higher, its normal that your shader also bumps to 1728 MHz. If youre seeing 1728MHz for shader clock when your core clock is lower than 689 then the GPU clocks are not acting the way they should but I think its very unlikely that you're seeing 1728MHz shader clock for any core clocks lower than 689MHz .

Basically on my 8800Ultra 648-666MHz core clock sets the shader clock at 1620MHz. 667-688MHz core ==> 1674MHz shader. 689MHz core ==>1728MHz shader.

Unfortunately I haven't seen any application that lets you change the core/shader clock independently in real-time.

EDIT: Changed the core clocks to their exact correct values.